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Choreographic Outcomes: Improving Dance Composition

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Reviews
CHOREOGRAPHIC OUTCOMES:
IMPROVING DANCE COMPOSITION
by Jacqueline Smith-Autard and Jim Scho-
field, assisted by Michael Schofield. 2005. Bed-
ford Interactive Productions. 3 CD-ROMs
(for PC) including Resource Pack with “Cre­­-
ative Practice Guidebook” and Smith-Autard’s
“Dance Composition” (5th ed, 2004). $360.
Computer-aided instruction for dance is
a hard sell. On the one hand, judging
from the proliferation of dance technology-
related websites, dancers seem more inter-
ested in computer applications for perfor-
mance than instruction. Not surprisingly,
dance is regarded by the educational soft-
ware industry as something less than a
niche market and therefore a low-priority
investment. On the other hand, popular
views of educational technology in dance
tend to exaggerate both its promise and its
peril. Advocates tout computers and the In-
ternet as instant remedies for dry curric-
ulum and didactic instruction. Alarmists
worry that computers will undermine cre-
ative activity and the World Wide Web will
replace teachers as the preferred source of
information.
Until recently, these states of mutual dis-
interest and distrust among dancers, edu-
cators, and software-makers have resulted
in a serious lack of imaginative, intelligent,
and effective educational uses of new tech-
nologies in dance. No more. Together with
Bedford Interactive (www.dance-interactive
.web.com), Jacqueline Smith-Autard’s re-
cent forays into educational technology
have produced a series of state-of-the-art
CD-ROMs for dance and dance education.
These impressive computer resources com-
bine Smith-Autard’s substantial knowledge
with Jim Schofield’s commonsensical ap-
proach to the technology. Their most recent
production, Choreographic Outcomes, avoids
placing too much emphasis on the technol-
ogy itself, leaving ample room for people—
especially teachers—to shape its role in
learning.
Choreographic Outcomes is described as a
“comprehensive CD-ROM resource pack
. . . aimed at improving student choreog-
raphy through detailed study . . . [with]
full access video of 8 dance pieces.” Sounds
simple, but do not let the attractive pack-
aging fool you. While the program can
be used off-the-shelf to good effect, it is
a teaching and learning resource that ex-
pands exponentially if one understands the
logic behind its approach. In the interests
of full disclosure, I admit to a predisposi-
tion toward technological applications and
Smith-Autard’s work in particular. How-
ever, before now, I had not previously used
or beta-tested this program, so I came to it
with fresh eyes (and ears).
The first thing you will notice about the
program is the high-quality production val-
ues. It is clear from the outset that this is
a hefty piece of software with plenty of
features and supporting materials that lie
just off the beaten path. The package in-
cludes three CD-ROM discs, a Creative
Practice Guidebook, and Smith-Autard’s book
Dance Composition (2004). The program in-
cludes over a hundred movies and requires
a lot of computer memory, so Bedford In-
teractive includes two different discs to al-
low the user two options: direct-use from
disc or full-install on user’s hard drive. The
direct-use option downloads each movie
as you select it and thus involves a short
delay each time you click on a new movie.
If you can spare the 630 MB on your hard
drive, then I recommend the full-install
option. You’ll move more quickly through
the program and you can insert the Work-
sheets disc, which includes an electronic
version of activity worksheets. A helpful in-
struction booklet walks you through these
options.
  91
 The potential of all these resources at
the touch of one’s fingertips is enticing.
Unfortunately, I realized immediately that
I could not access the CD-ROMs because
I work on an Apple PowerBook with Mac
OS X. The hardware requirements for Cho-
reographic Outcomes are quite reasonable, but
a PC Windows environment is required. In
my experience, many American dance stu-
dents, teachers, and programs in higher ed-
ucation, use and stock computer labs with
Apple computers. The market may be too
small, or the cost prohibitive, but I sincerely
hope Bedford Interactive has plans for a bi-
platform version in the near future.
You can start working with Choreographic
Outcomes by click-opening the source video,
“Motifs For A Solo Dancer,” which takes
you to a step-by-step analysis of the original
piece. The options include viewing the entire
filmed solo, a universal access feature, a li-
brary of key motifs, time analysis, and space
analysis. As a graduate student in the mid-
1990s, I participated in numerous usability
studies at Harvard University’s Education
with New Technologies project (http://
learnweb.harvard.edu). CD-ROMs were
the latest technology, and I learned phrases
like “wayfinding index” and “universal ac-
cess” to describe the nexus between acces-
sibility, ease-of-use, navigation, and inter­-
face elements. Bedford Interactive deserves
high marks on all these design indices.
Overall, Choreographic Outcomes takes
full advantage of what computers do best.
The multiple representations—from dia-
grams to videos—make it highly accessible,
deepening the learning experience without
sacrificing breadth of information. The
ubiquitous views, perspectives, and thumb-
nail pictures make it easy to follow and fun
to use. The logical structure, clearly marked
buttons, and text directions support navi-
gation through the sophisticated analyses.
92  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
The uncluttered desktop’s attractive color
and font scheme is one of the most appeal-
ing interface designs that I have seen in
any educational software. The high-quality
film and sound direction are impressive
and essential. The solo performer, Lauren
Potter, is a brilliant dancer of remarkable
movement clarity and articulation. I found
her lack of affect somewhat curious, but
perhaps there was a conscious decision to
focus on form versus feeling. Regardless, it
is clear that Bedford Interactive engaged a
dream team of dancers, educators, and de-
signers to produce this work.
Though Bedford Interactive and I have
different definitions of the term, I was par-
ticularly enchanted with the Universal Ac-
cess option. In some software design circles,
universal access refers to software design that
seeks to make new media accessible to every-
one; for example, creating “electronic curb-
cuts” for cognitively or hearing-impaired
persons (see www.cast.org). Bedford Inter-
active uses the term Universal Access to mean
a comprehensive, catholic look at all aspects
of the dance composition. On a single page,
one has access to the whole solo dance: its
movement phrases, key motifs, and tim-
ing. So, for instance, if one wants to make
a close examination of how the “tip” motif
develops into a “tip back into travel” phrase,
one can easily locate the motif, watch its
development from a thumbnail video that
pops up seamlessly into a full view, and lis-
ten to the precise musical phrase in which
it occurs. In the space and time analyses
sections, I yearned for a Labanotation score
to round out the phrase structure studies,
but I suppose enough is enough. One has to
make choices, and the choices are generally
splendid.
I found that one of the more innovative
choices included an “Outcomes” section:
that is, seven new pieces choreographed
by three different people inspired by the
original solo motif. Details of participants
are included in this section, which serves
as a kind of credits-cum-comparison page.
Here one can read about the director and
choreographers, view the new works, re-
view a detailed composition analysis, and
compare the new works to the solo dance in
a directed or search mode. The comparison
modes place the outcome video next to the
solo video, allowing the viewer to compare
and contrast the phrases. Or, at least, I think
that is the intention. This section is a great
idea, but it seemed like a bridge too far for
the computer. I was never able to make this
function work to my satisfaction. Of course,
it is entirely plausible that, after eight hours,
I was losing my mind and my (borrowed)
computer was losing its memory.
Clearly, Choreographic Outcomes is no
“plug-and-play” program. It is a sophisti-
cated, deeply intelligent, effortful endeavor.
The fact that it embeds many important
educational insights and practices into the
very fabric of the program should also come
as no surprise. Dance education is Smith-
Autard’s bailiwick. This is an important
advantage, but also a real challenge to the
user. There is no simple answer to how one
makes effective educational use of new tech-
nologies. Sometimes the tool seems attrac-
tive, but exactly how to integrate it in prac-
tice is unclear. Fortunately, Smith-Autard
has brought her “A” game to this issue. She
understands learning, how diversified it is,
and how important it is to develop methods
and materials that are as articulated and
flexible as the individuals utilizing them.
For this reason, the accompanying sup-
port materials are key to the effective use of
this program. The Dance Composition book
provides a clear framework for integrating
teacher-directed instruction with opportu-
nities and challenges for creative and criti-
cal inquiry. Through a series of carefully
constructed activities and worksheets, the
Creative Practice Guidebook demonstrates
how to use the technology selectively to
present dynamic models of key concepts or
to enable students to participate together in
disciplined inquiry.
I highly recommend this computer re-
source to dance professionals in private
studios and higher education. Before buy-
ing the program, however, I suggest you
review Smith-Autard’s The Art of Dance
in Education (2002). This seminal work
will alert you to the conditions affecting
teaching and learning, and highlight how
technology might improve your practice.
Next, be sure to use the supporting mate-
rials in concert with the discs. Together,
the program and materials can promote the
kind of retention, understanding, and ac-
tive use of difficult concepts—such as mo­
tif development—that are both crucial to
further progress in dance and widely rec-
ognized as difficult to teach and learn.
Finally, respect the process and take your
time. When used by knowledgeable dance
instructors in a reflective, integrated way, I
have found that this new interactive, por-
table tool can extend instruction beyond
the dance studio and significantly enhance
student learning.
Edward C. Warburton,
University of California, Santa Cruz
Works Cited
Smith-Autard, Jacqueline M. 2002. The
Art of Dance in Education. 2nd ed. Lon-
don: A&C Black.
———. 2004. Dance Composition: A Practi-
cal Guide for Teachers. 5th ed. New York:
Routledge—A Theatre Arts Book.
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  93
 DANCING IDENTIT Y: METAPHYSICS
IN MOTION
by Sondra Fraleigh. 2004. University of
Pittsburgh Press, xiii + 285 pp., illustrations.
Sondra Fraleigh’s latest book, Dancing Iden­-
tity reads as an apologia for her philosophi-
cal ideas about dance, what she values most
in dance and what has interested her as a
performer, choreographer, writer and move­
ment therapist throughout her many years
of professional activity. One hears in her
analyses a spirit of inquiry that is un­certain
of the world, but confident too in the sur-
prising possibilities that emerge with ex-
plorative movements, whether in the more
exclusively symbolic order of theory or the
embodied realm of the dancer. It is a gentle,
persevering spirit attempting to navigate
through the conceptual vagaries of contem-
porary theories of meaning including the
problems of mind/body interaction, agency
and the social construction of personal
identity. Although Fraleigh’s scrutiny of
the philosophical problems never goes far
enough, one feels sympathy for her point
of view. Rather than making the familiar,
harshly critical gesture of the contempo-
rary scholar, hers is the self-affirming act of
both the therapist and someone for whom
dance has brought healing from a difficult
childhood marked by soul-damaging vio-
lence. Dancing Identity presents both Fra­-
leigh’s life experiences in dance and her
philosophical commitments to existential
phenomenology as therapeutic processes of
self-affirmation.
An acting teacher once told me that an-
ger is the easiest emotion to play on stage
because it defends us in threatening situa-
tions. On the other hand, softer emotions
such as affection, desire, unhappiness and
joy are more difficult to portray convincingly
because such feelings expose us as vulner-
94  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
ably related to others. Unlike some critical
theory that gets published today, Fraleigh’s
discussion is not a diatribe against either
other theorists or specific cultural prac-
tices. She disagrees with Michel Foucault,
Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, and
even sometimes Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
but her critical responses are mitigated by
an explicit acceptance of the timeliness of
their particular rhetorical gestures, as well
as of their contributions to our understand-
ing of meaning making, embodied life and
self-identity. At times Fraleigh seems self-
indulgent; especially when she interjects her
theoretical discussions with quasi-poetical
reflections. Her aims and achievements in
these sections remain obscure. On the other
hand, her commitments to existentialism as
a philosophy of life and phenomenological
method as a therapeutic process of self-
discovery are clearly stated, if inadequately
defended, from an academic point of view.
One important philosophical discussion
Fraleigh offers in Dancing Identity concerns
the concepts of mastery and control often
central to both philosophers’ and dancers’
(especially ballet dancers’) understanding of
how mind connects to body. Her aim is to
displace contemporary dualistic paradigms
that suppose embodiment to be configured
primarily by structures of domination, sub­-
jugation and self-discipline. Dance, as a dis­-
ciplinary practice, is reframed more posi-
tively by Fraleigh, as a transformational cul­-
tivation of the body based on a process she
calls “matching.” It involves, for example,
matching appropriately our attention to
our tasks, or matching in an accepting way
rather than defensively, our responses to
the expressed feelings or worries that we
interpret another to have. As a psycho-
logical strategy, matching results in self-
affirmation, self-directed learning, and self-
acceptance. As a better way for dancers to
conceive the mind’s relation to the body, it
should not be understood to imply loose or
nonexistent standards of excellence (124).
“To match, rather than master, the already
transcendent nature of the world would
be to dance, to engage in anything for the
pleasure of the doing itself and not for fu-
ture rewards (123).
Although the concept of matching makes
an important contribution to our under-
standing of agency and embodiment, it
needs a fuller explanation. Fraleigh’s relies
on over generalized interpretations of some
decontextualized Heideggerian concepts
and on ideas gained from her study of Japa-
nese Butoh dance. Interpreting a quote from
Butoh artist and creator, Tatsumi Hijikata,
Fraleigh argues that Eastern practices such
as Butoh, Zen and yoga explore the basis of
human nature in the transformational dy-
namics of mind-body: “Discipline is not the
master word here; rather cultivation is sug-
gested” (30). Through self-cultivation we
have the capacity to “experience the bodies
of others through the unlimited nature of
our own body” (31). In the practice of Butoh
dance the will is not conceived as central
to this transformational process. The focus
instead is on the expression of a creativ-
ity that unifies biological, psychological,
and social aspects. A person is understood
to be part of nature and the living world,
say Fraleigh. For the Butoh artist, embodi-
ment, therefore, does not reduce to social
categories nor is the person primarily a so-
cial actor without also being part of nature
(31). Such is Fraleigh’s dispute with social
constructionist analyses of embodiment.
Her claims are appealing, as is her process
of intellectual discovery (through reading
philosophy and thinking through her dance
and movement therapy practices). More-
over, her attempt to articulate how humans
are part of nature rather than intellectually
alienated from the material stuff of the liv-
ing world resonates with recent shifts in the
biological sciences that consider the impact
of environmental and social factors on gene
development and expression.1 However, as
with her earlier book, The Lived Body, the
concepts to which she appeals and the phil-
osophical problems they presuppose need a
more thorough-going critical development.
In some respects Dancing Identity is more
rigorous than Fraleigh’s earlier work. Where
she seemed, at one time, unsuspecting of
the essentialist metaphysical assumptions
of her phenomenological method, we find
her now working through Beauvoir’s anti-
essentialist claims about femininity and
embodiment. Fraleigh juxtaposes her read-
ing of Beauvoir with an account of the life
and work of Mary Wigman, and, because
she studied with Wigman in Germany in
1965, she disagrees with Susan Manning’s
interpretation of Wigman’s aesthetics as
masculinist/Fascist.2 Fraleigh presents the
Wigman she knew and from whom she
gained not only her feminist convictions
but a sense of drama and the courage to ex-
plore movements, both beautiful and ugly,
through the “tactile-kinaesthetic-affective
body” (35).
There are, nevertheless, serious prob-
lems in the existentialism Fraleigh draws
upon to develop her metaphysics of mo-
tion. Her claims are weakened by not ac-
knowledging, for example, the feminist
criticisms of the bourgeois ideals inform-
ing Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s, (and possibly
her own) observations of life. Important
criticisms have also been made of the ego-
centeredness of the existentialist concept of
freedom. Although Fraleigh explicates val-
iantly the contributions of Foucault, Butler
and Donna Haraway to the discussions of
agency and self-identity, the really tough-
minded philosophical problems are not re­-
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  95
 solved so easily by appealing to Eastern
notions of mind, body and self. The dif-
ficulty is that Fraleigh is not interested in
either philosophy or critical theory from an
academic perspective. She reads theory for
what it teaches her about life. Rather than
providing a full rationale of what she finds
most worthy of knowing, an explanation
that some of us are wanting rather badly,
instead she signals, almost like a mystic, to
movement projects and dancerly activities
that can lead the reader to a more Zen-like,
self-affirming relationship with others, na-
ture and the lived world. Any frustration
experienced because of this lack of critical
analysis is alleviated somewhat by the in-
terjections of Fraleigh’s story of personal
struggle. These unchosen challenges in her
life obviously inform her philosophical in-
terests and solicit a sense of respect for the
life she did choose.
Granting the transformational potential
of cultural practices, Fraleigh asks, “What
kind of culture will we make of our nature?”
Her answer turns to the possibilities she
sees available even to the practice of classi-
cal ballet, a dance art form to its core struc-
tured by the values of mastery, control and
perfection (117). Fraleigh argues that there
are ways of training ballet dancers to find
their movement potentials without force
and strain. There are now ballet teachers
who address the care of the body and who
train dancers to have an internal aware-
ness of how their particular bodies moves.
Moreover, ballet dancers can be taught to
shift the focus from perfection, says Fra-
leigh. Rather than looking at themselves,
they can learn to think kinesthetically by
developing an ability to sense what feels
good or right when moving (117).
Although Fraleigh concedes also to the
transformational potential of human na-
ture, its possibilities are constrained by the
destructive effects of violence, environ-
96  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
mental pollution and war. We can choose
the values we want to teach, such as war or
love, says Fraleigh, “but the body does not
respond well to rough violations” (118). So,
in the end, she disagrees with any theory
of the body which presupposes nature to be
entirely effaced by cultural forms and sym-
bolically determined values. “Our dances are
made of nature, the rhythms of our bodies
and nights on earth, even as the dance itself
is made possible through that same body
rhythm, whether we decide to listen to it
or not. The nonhuman forms and rhythms
around us also help to root our sensibilities
and movements.” (118).
Fraleigh advocates for a metaphysical
space through which the process of self-
becoming is based on “a willingness to love”
rather than a Nietzschean-derived under-
standing of the self as a work of art (202).
One ought to choose one’s pleasures and
practices using criteria arising from an ethic
of care to be discovered in somatic princi-
ples of touch. These include values such as
“do no harm,” “listen without imposition,”
and “hear without judgment” (202). Fra-
leigh reminds us that our bodies respond
to care and are empowered by care-taking.
“The vital material investments of the body
are contiguous with its nature [ . . . ]. They
are the natural abilities that give rise to all
of our corporeal possibilities, whether self-
referential or directed toward others and
the environment” (202).
Though revealing a certain degree of
philosophical naivety, there is something
indisputable about these ideas. Few danc-
ers would contest the claim that it is both
possible and important to listen to one’s
body in the process of its transformation
through any kind of dance training. What
needs more elaboration, however, is the no-
tion of listening. What exactly are we doing
when we pay attention to the body’s natural
rhythms? Can it be assumed that everyone
has an innate ability to distinguish what is
right for the body? Fraleigh believes that we
can trust our inner sense of what is right,
but surely it is not so simple. People with
anorexia, for example, often have a distorted
sense of their size and weight. Natures can
be nurtured to experience very different
sensibilities as “right.”
Despite her book’s lack of theoreti-
cal rigor, Fraleigh succeeds, nevertheless,
in bringing together contemporary ideas
and philosophical problems in a way that
grounds their relevance compellingly in her
lived experience of the dancer’s life. Therein
lays the merits of her work.
Suzanne M. Jaeger,
Atkinson College, York University
Notes
1. For a general overview some recent
research in the biological sciences indicat-
ing the reciprocal effects of environmental
factors, social values and genetic make-up
and expression, see Lynda Birke’s “Biologi-
cal Sciences” in A. Jagger and I. Young,
Companion to Feminist Philosophy, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998.
2. Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the
Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the
Dances of Mary Wigman, (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1993).
DANCING MACHINES: CHOREOGRA-
PHIES OF THE AGE OF MECHANICAL
REPRODUCTION
by Felicia McCarren. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003. 254 pp., notes, bibli-
ography, index. $50.00 cloth.
In April 1974, the Jackson Five appeared on
the Mike Douglas Show to sing their hit
single, “Dancing Machine.” With the au-
tomated disco sound of synthesizers, a per-
sistent beat, and repeating lyrics, the young
boy-band sang of a lady who got down on
the dance floor as soon as the music began
to play—she was a righteous, sexy, space
age, dancing machine. Although the song
was already a popular sensation, Michael
Jackson’s dancing was the true highlight.
As the band played—with each Jackson
wearing his own color of the same jacket,
flared pants, and shiny cummerbund—the
fifteen-year-old Michael performed a dance
called “The Robot,” a pop-and-lock routine
that resembled the angularity and inter-
rupted flow of a moving machine.
Felicia McCarren’s recent book, Danc-
ing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction, takes its title from
the Jacksons’ hit song. But McCarren is in-
terested in much more than dancing that
resembles stylized robotics. According to
McCarren, the song “Dancing Machine”
suggests two interlocked yet contradictory
images: dancing that looks mechanical, and
dancing that works like a machine—“an
in­defatigable perpetuum mobile, a dancing
that emulates machine logic rather than
machinelike movement” (3). While the first
image is easily recognizable and has been
written about extensively, the second image
surprisingly links machines with dancing
that possesses an organic or graceful qual-
ity. By analyzing both images, McCarren
presents a refreshingly complex discussion
of the relationship between technology and
moving bodies.
According to McCarren, conflicting
mod­els of the dancing machine existed well
before the age of break dancing and disco,
emerging in Europe as responses to me-
chanical reproduction during the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century. Dancing
Machines takes this earlier era as its terrain,
analyzing modernist texts of all kinds, from
the development of Taylorism and scientific
management, to the canonical writings of
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  97
 Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and William
Butler Yeats, to the choreography of mod-
ern dancers such as Isadora Duncan and
Josephine Baker. According to McCarren,
although modernism’s canonical writers re-
flected upon dance in their work, the actual
dancers have been written out of cultural
history because they themselves were not
writers. To counter this omission, McCar-
ren insists throughout her book upon the
importance of dance—its performance, re-
ception, and appearance across artistic me-
dia. With research that spans a wide variety
of texts and performances, McCarren con-
nects aspects of modernism seldom brought
together and shows that dance was a crucial
part of late 19th- and early 20th-century in-
tellectual and cultural history.
One of Dancing Machines’ most signi­
ficant contributions to the field of dance
studies is its demonstration that dance
and technology have been intertwined at
least since the late nineteenth century. By
sketching the overlapping development of
modern dance and machine culture, Mc-
Carren challenges the entrenched belief
that dance is an ephemeral, bodily art nec-
essarily at odds with technology. Still, Mc-
Carren does not believe that dance survived
the machine age unscathed. For this reason,
her title refers not only to the Jackson Five,
but also to Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Re-
production.” In this remarkably influential
essay, first published in 1935, Benjamin ar-
gues that mechanical reproduction’s ability
to introduce multiple copies where art ob-
jects once existed uniquely caused the ob-
ject’s “aura” to “wither,” thereby displacing
outmoded concepts like genius and creativ-
ity. For Benjamin, aura represents a spiri-
tual quality, a relic of the human attach-
ment to ritual and magic, which animates
the object. Whereas artworks once were
98  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
attached to ritual and situated in remote lo-
cations accessible only to a privileged few,
technological reproduction made artworks
increasingly mobile and available as com-
modities for the masses, available at very
close range. Although Benjamin embraces
the revolutionary potential of mechanical
reproduction, his thoughts about aura’s de-
cay are laden with nostalgia.
McCarren grapples with this same ten-
sion, but arrives at a conclusion more fatalist
than Benjamin’s. According to McCarren,
mechanical reproduction brought about the
“death” of dance. She explains, “ultimately
the machine that would bring dance to the
masses—showing them what they would
no longer have gone to see live on stage, as-
suring dance a wider audience and longer
life—is also the machine that would kill
it” (8). She argues that mass media eclipsed
contemporary choreography and, with the
invention of cinema, reduced dance “defini-
tively to the realm of entertainment” (31).
When McCarren declares that mechanical
reproduction “killed” or “crushed” dance,
she suggests a loss of Benjaminian aura.
She also refers to the marginalization of
dance, arguing that by the mid-twentieth
century, dance no longer held the same cul-
tural prominence that it occupied in nine-
teenth-century France. These claims raise
several questions that go unanswered in
Dancing Machines: First, does it really make
sense to claim nineteenth-century ballet as
a mass form with cultural centrality? Then,
did cinema really “eclipse” contemporary
choreography? How so? Undoubtedly, more
people today watch DVDs on a given night
than go to the ballet. But does this really
mean that dance is dead?
Although Dancing Machines is in many
ways a scholarly tour de force, McCarren’s
chapters are so packed with case studies
that the book occasionally loses its sense of
direction. Some of McCarren’s most pro-
vocative claims leave the reader wondering
how the various strands of her discussion
relate to the book as a whole. This is par-
ticularly true in McCarren’s suggestions,
interspersed throughout the first half of the
book, that the dancing machine had nega-
tive racial implications. Early on, McCar-
ren claims that race became a fundamental
quality for performers during the machine
age, obscuring dancers’ individual identi-
ties and forcing “the disappearance of the
dancer into the dance” (144). A sustained
discussion of race, however, does not ap-
pear until the book’s final two chapters,
where McCarren discusses Michio Ito and
Josephine Baker. The Baker chapter is fas-
cinating, and holds the greatest potential
for relating race to dancing machines. Un-
fortunately, McCarren does not adequately
account for the chapter’s central claim,
and, to the extent she does, she under-
mines the brief statements about race that
appear elsewhere in the book. According
to McCarren, Baker represented to Pari-
sian au­diences both the American jazz age
(viewed as ultra modern and frequently
linked with machines) and the “African
primitive” (thought to be timeless and “nat-
ural”). Yet, analyzing films such as Zou Zou
and Princess Tam-Tam, McCarren argues
that cinema enabled Baker to transcend
restrictions on live performances in the
United States and to resist the commodi-
fication of “primitive” art objects displayed
in museums throughout Europe. Accord-
ing to McCarren, “The cinematic elabora-
tion of [Baker’s] image, in movement and
sound, allowed Baker some resistance to
the kind of static representation that effec-
tively made her an art object. Instead, she
used cinema—or it used her—to regenerate
the image of the human motor as both the
engine driving the machine age and a cri-
tique of its mechanization” (163). Although
McCarren urges the reader to distinguish
between lithographs of Baker and filmed
performances, she does not fully explain
why a moving image is less prone to com-
modification than still images. In the end,
McCarren retreats from her initial claim,
acknowledging, “Baker and her film im-
age may not have successfully combated
racism” (190). McCarren’s final argument
is that cinema granted Baker another life,
preserving her dances not just for Paris, but
for posterity, a limited claim that would be
equally true of still images.
By the final pages of Dancing Machines,
it seems that McCarren does not even be-
lieve the book’s central thesis: that dance
is dead. Contradicting her earlier asser-
tions, McCarren’s concluding chapter rec-
ognizes that the dancing machine is not
merely a thing of the distant past. In the
book’s final four pages, McCarren com-
ments on hip hop and the experimental
work of New York-based choreographer
Koosil-ja Hwang, whose choreography in-
tegrates dance and interactive digital media.
Although McCarren only mentions these
few examples, numerous choreographers
are doing interesting work with technol-
ogy, from well-established choreographers
like Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham,
and Bill T. Jones, to smaller companies like
Troika Ranch, Igloo, Company in Space,
and Capacitor. The list is wide and worthy
of further study. McCarren also explains
that discussions of dancing machines can
be found in the philosophical writings of
Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Fe-
lix Guattari, Isabelle Stenger, and Mi-
chèle Pridmore-Brown, who grapple with
late twentieth-century technology and the
blurring distinctions between man and ma-
chine. This far-reaching list suggests not a
rupture with earlier twentieth-century ma­-
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  99
 chines, but a continuation of that history.
The dancing machine is still with us. In
the end, Dancing Machines usefully calls
upon scholars to examine how dance in the
late twentieth century, now known as the
digital age, relates to technological inven-
tion. One can’t plausibly argue that dance
has been sidelined to mere entertainment
when so many choreographers continue to
do rigorous work. Nor can one plausibly
argue that dance’s cultural significance has
disappeared. Perhaps it is more accurate to
say that dance has moved away from classi-
cal ballet and the European concert stage in
order to find new life in loft spaces and out
on the streets. One suspects, however, that
it has existed there all along.
Danielle Goldman,
New York University
Work Cited
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion.” In Illuminations. Edited and with
an Introduction by Hannah Arendt.
Translated by Harry Zohn. New York:
Schocken Books.
BUT TING OUT: READING RESIS-
TIVE CHOREOGRAPHIES THROUGH
WORKS BY JAWOLE WILLA JO
ZOLLAR AND CHANDRALEKHA
by Ananya Chatterjea. 2004. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press. xv + 377
pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
$29.95 paper.
The field of postcolonial studies has dem-
onstrated how Western ideas of civiliza-
tion, progress and innovation have been
validated through tropes about the “primi-
tive” and “tradition-bound” nature of large
populations of the planet’s peoples. This
100  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
insight, advanced from a variety of disci-
plines, has started to make an appearance in
dance scholarship (Browning 1997; Dixon-
Gottschild 1996; Savigliano 1995). In Butt-
ing Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies
Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
and Chandralekha, scholar-dancer Ananya
Chatterjea takes up the issue in earnest
with respect to contemporary dance. Ex-
amining the movement vocabularies and
cultural and historical legacies in which
these choreographers operate, Chatterjea
interrogates how ideas of “modernity” and
“postmodernity” in dance have consistently
refused non-White and third world artists
a place within definitions of the artistically
radical, or avant-garde. Casting the rele­
vance of her project broadly, she makes a
strong case for concert dance as “a potent
source of information, analysis, and cri-
tique, linked intimately to the processes of
sociocultural and political change (30).” As
such, the book will appeal to a wide intel-
lectual audience, including scholars and
students of performance studies, race stud-
ies, women’s studies, and subaltern studies.
One of the most interesting things about
the book is Chatterjea’s decision to read
these two artists together. In some elegant
reasoning in the first chapter, Chatterjea
alerts readers to the fact that her project
does not constitute some kind of simplistic
“cross-cultural” study, nor is it an attempt
to equate very different “women of color”
through the suspect logics of multicultur-
alism. Her desire is rather to explore ways
in which racial and cultural difference
manifest through relationships which oper-
ate both horizontally as well as vertically.
Through colonialism and globalization, the
same concerns vex varied contexts, such
that one can observe similar political im-
pulses, even as aesthetics differ. Ultimately,
the book is a sophisticated response to the
common urge to think of culture in the
crude terms of the tired binary, “white/
West” and “the rest.” Chatterjea’s aim is to
consider the possibility of dialogues across
populations of color.
In observing parallels between the two
artists, Chatterjea reads both Chandra­lekha
and Zollar as activists, whose aesthetic
choices serve as vehicles for commentary on
everyday realities as well as on the loaded
history of representation of female bodies
of color. In Chapter 2 she introduces us to
the political stances of the choreographers
and attempts to trace how their “radical
feminism,” sense of spirituality, and general
defiance shapes movement vocabularies. I
found myself wishing that Chatterjea spent
a bit more time delineating artistic strate-
gies at this point. In particular, some more
explanation of traditional bharatanatyam
vocabulary, as well as Indian aesthetic prin­-
ciples such as rasa, might allow readers
unfamiliar with this dance form to appre-
ciate more clearly Chandralekha’s re­con­-
figurations.
Chatterjea is highly conscious of the
intellectual choices she makes and is con-
cerned to “locate” both her object of study,
as well as her conceptual frameworks of
analysis. One of the strengths of this book
lies in Chatterjea’s insistence on bringing
her observations about the choreographers
under consideration into conversation with
debates about topics of cross-disciplinary
concern. In particular she gives great impor-
tance to discussions about the body, as well
as questions of historiography. In Chapter
3 she explores the literature about embodi-
ment, asking the question that seems to
echo through much of current dance schol-
arship, namely how to articulate the body’s
intelligence without silencing it through
language. According to Chatterjea, while
feminist scholarship has made significant
contributions to the theorizing of embodi-
ment, much sociological and anthropologi-
cal literature does not see the body in light
of power dynamics (75–76). This general
dismissal seems hard to sustain, since sev-
eral ethnographic studies which comment
on the body—particularly with respect to
sense experience, violence, or gender—have
explicitly examined its materiality in rela-
tion to power (to cite but a few, Bolin and
Granskog 2003; Feldman 1991; Gremil-
lion 2003; Martin 1987; Scheper-Hughes
2004; Seremetakis 1996). In reviewing the
recent literature from dance studies, how-
ever, Chatterjea is admirably thorough in
tracing her academic antecedents. Indeed,
this whole chapter makes a productive read
for students, as it gives a clear sense of how
dance scholarship has contributed to im-
portant, cross-disciplinary debates about
corporeality.
Chatterjea continues her careful charting
of her own theoretical models into Chapter
4 and 5, this time with respect to the prob-
lems of historiography which have plagued
much of dance studies. She advances her
idea of the alternative forms of postmodern­
ity inhabited by artists of color and non-
western artists. Moreover, following the
footsteps of Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, she
offers examples of how such artists were
actually very much at the heart of radical
dance developments. With respect to histo-
riography more generally, Chatterjea aligns
her work with historical projects aimed at
subverting Western, linear narratives. She
then traces the most relevant histories—the
fate of the Indian devadasi dancer and her
erasure at the nexus of colonialism and na-
tionalism, on the one hand, and the history
of African American exclusion from con-
cert dance, on the other.
Although a subheading that appears early
on in the book proclaims, “You Should Be
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  101
 Dancing Now,” it is not really until Chapter
6 that Chatterjea presents the reader with
some choreography. When she finally takes
up the task, however, she does so with de-
scriptive flair. Chatterjea makes every at-
tempt to allow the body to speak through
her careful use of language which conveys a
clear sense of how movement actually looks.
Her level of detail serves her well in the ar-
guments she makes about how the dances
subvert stereotypes, redefine mainstream
or traditional dance styles, retell histories,
engage in the queering of female sexu-
alities, or explore the political potential of
feminist communities. All told, Chatterjea
does close readings of eleven dances in this
chapter, dividing the discussion into nine
sections. It was not clear to me on what ba-
sis those particular works were selected and
not others. Yet that aside, what emerges is
a comprehensive assessment of each artist’s
contributions.
The book did leave me with some ques-
tions. Given that so much in the work of
Chandralekha and Zollar is about subvert-
ing hierarchies, it would be interesting to
know something about the process of their
creating dances, in particular the kinds of
relationships they establish with their com-
pany members. Chatterjea does not include
much observation of rehearsals, nor does
she interview dancers. The primary point
of reference is the choreographer herself, an
analytical move that runs the risk of affirm-
ing conventional Westerns ideas about the
singular artistic genius whose creative pro-
cess stands somehow outside the stream of
everyday life. On a similar note, in taking
assiduous care to locate the artists in their
respective historical and cultural contexts,
it might be interesting to include some in-
formation about who constitutes the audi-
ences for the works, as well as some detail
about how the artists navigate the political
economy of contemporary dance produc-
102  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
tion. The case of Chandralekha is particu-
larly provocative in this regard as her audi-
ence in India is relatively small. Finally, it
is not entirely clear what is meant by the
term “resistance.” Given that this concept
forms a primary preoccupation with schol-
ars from numerous disciplines, who use it in
all kinds of ways in very different contexts,
it seems important to locate one’s academic
antecedents with respect to it. While this
could hold true for any academic writing, it
seems all the more urgent when the object
of study is postmodern dance. There is a
fundamental conundrum of how a funda-
mentally elite artistic field relates to ideas
of socio-political resistance. This is not to
argue that resistance is relevant only when
dealing with popular culture or extremely
marginal populations. It is rather to sug-
gest that resistance is often contradictory
in nature, affirming of certain power rela­
tions and systems of meaning even as it
elides them, and should be acknowledged
as such.
These questions aside, there is no doubt
that this book constitutes a serious contri-
bution to cutting-edge dance scholarship. It
is clearly the product of an author who is
both a rigorous thinker and sensitive to the
kinds of moves one has to make in writing
about dance. Moreover, as the first major
study of two very important figures in con-
temporary dance, Chatterjea’s work is sure
to serve as a point of reference for scholars,
students, and dancers for years to come.
Shanti Pillai,
Global Studies
Sarah Lawrence College
Works Cited
Bolin, Anne and Jane Granskog, eds.
2003. Athletic Intruders: Ethnographic
Research on Women, Culture, and Exer-
cise. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Browning, Barbara. 1997. Infectious
 Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the
Spread of African Culture. New York:
Routledge.
Dixon-Gottschild, Brenda. 1996. Digging
the Africanist Presence in American Per-
formance. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of
Violence: The Narrative of the Body and
Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
ANGORA MAT TA: FATAL ACTS OF
NORTH-SOUTH TRANSLATION =
ACTOS FATALES DE TRADUCCIÓN
NORTE-SUR,
by Marta Elena Savigliano, Illustrations by
Marta Elena Savigliano, 2003. Middletown,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press +262
pp, 25 b/w illustrations, bi-lingual: Spanish/
English. hardcover $70.00; $24.95 paper.
Marta Elena Savigliano, the author of Tango
and the Political Economy of Passion (1995),
recorded her text with a “tango tongue.”
That is, a voice that is necessarily impro-
visatory in keeping with the dance itself.
Her new book, Angora Matta: Fatal Acts
of North-South Translation picks up Tango’s
cue. When both works are taken together—
or literally understood as dance partners—a
thoughtful continuum is presented to schol-
arship. This continuum reminds critics that
the critique of performance is always already
unfinished. Thus, the analytical approaches
to performance demand constant re-vision
and experimentation. Buenos Aires, as stand
in for Argentina, is the central preoccupa-
tion shared by both works. The city’s per-
petual crises wrought by the ordering disci-
pline of transnational capital, dictatorships,
its military, and overall history of violence
and rebellion, function as the formative (or
reparative) grounds of her work. In her lat-
est text, Savigliano further reaches towards
what the city feels like, how it is danced,
and most importantly, how it moves beyond
its geographical coordinates.
Like Angora Matta, who works as both
title of the book and protagonist of its
Tangópera-Thriller found within, Savigli­
ano uses a variety of methodological dis-
guises. While Angora Matta resorts to
outfit changes to occupy a variety of func-
tions (both formal and ideological) in the
text, Savigliano inhabits and moves be-
tween theoretical domains so quickly that
her crossings often go undetected. These
quick backstage changes enable the author
to begin to describe the conditions of na-
tion and the ways in which they come to
be responded to. To borrow Randy Martin’s
useful phrase, Savigliano’s “critical moves”
doubly function as a larger reflection on the
academy. Women’s work, especially criti-
cal labor, often requires a set of disguises.
These camouflages help to smuggle in those
potentially unwanted critiques to the ways
in which knowledge gets produced. While
Tango begins by laying the groundwork nec-
essary for an affective writing of dance, An-
gora Matta proceeds by creatively address-
ing its fissures and unanswered questions.
In Angora Matta, Savigliano revises that
troubling conundrum for dance and music
critics everywhere: what are the different
ways in which our objects of study demand
to be written? In this sense, her prose feels
loaded with urgency. Angora Matta does
not only continue to think through the re-
lationship between dance and music, but
about writing itself.
The structure of Angora Matta could
be best described as a triptych in two lan-
guages. Its three chapters fold into one an-
other, without abandoning their respective
bilingual versions, to form a disorienting
whole. Each chapter features a variety of
bold moves that play with the stable con-
ventions of written forms. Savigliano leaves
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  103
 no writerly formula unturned; whether it is
the introductory note, the “correct” space of
playwriting, or even the scholarly article.
Throughout the book, there are shifts of au-
thorial voice, imaginative play with genre,
and lively winks throughout. Because of
the courageous scope of all of these criti-
cal gestures, the reader might indulge the
tentative impulse to order the text’s three
chapters into discrete entities—rendering
the book palpable and an easily consumable
object. But this would revoke the book’s
potential power. Instead, Savigliano’s chal-
lenge is the dizzying force with which she
hits us with all of these deceptively separate
parts all at once.
This “all at once” immediately makes it-
self felt through the graphic layout of the
text. For example, the Table of Contents/
Indice is laid out as a strategic legal argu-
ment brought to trial. But in Argentina,
where testimony is often rendered null and
void, cut short with criminal pardons, or
made to vanish completely, the Content’s
actual lengths are made disproportionate,
their scope uneven, echoing the mess that
is memory and its uneasy documentation.
Savigliano organizes these sections to im-
mediately rebuff those who would take ad-
vantage of those “inconsistencies” (which
in Argentina means disappearances) in the
historical record to deny their occurrence.
The chapters spill over, overlap, and cover
for the lapses of the other. The characters
and motifs escape, steal from one another,
flee only to reappear later, and modulate
from one section into the next. Each seg-
ment forces you to jump around, training
the reader that the act of verification is not
always an available option. In all, every
chapter’s “truth” or “sense” elusively chal-
lenges the ways in which knowledge is used
to perceive our objects of study. Or, as Savi-
gliano might insist, the way those objects
come to know us.
104  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
One recurrent character in the book, a
medium named XYa, appears in a few dif-
ferent manifestations. The medium claims
herself as the inspiration behind one of the
main characters (“The Witch”) featured in
the libretto of the second chapter, which
I discuss below. XYa sues the librettist on
the grounds of intellectual property, the
unsanctioned use of her person, and her
overall representation without proper com-
pensation. Compensation in this case is
not necessarily monetary, but connotes the
transfer (or stealing back) of ownership of
one’s own representation. XYa makes her
damages against the librettist, and those
that implicate ethnographers in general,
public. The medium’s claim is made clear:
the librettist simply cannot represent her.
The details of the medium’s interior life
run away from the librettist’s desire to cap-
ture them. This inability to capture, as the
medium points out, suggests the failure of
representation in and of itself. The medi-
um’s testimonies are anticipated and ar-
ranged by the librettist’s responses (and vice
versa). These are interwoven in a series of
documented, bilingual exchanges that com-
prise the first chapter, the aptly named “An
Uneasy Pact/Un Pacto Infeliz.” Although
“uneasy,” the text’s Spanish/English trans-
lations are disturbingly literal, felicitous to
the point of wonder. Bilingual critics often
rely upon the imperfections of translations
as an opaque space for interpretive play.
What might Savigliano be arguing through
her foreclosure of this space?
At one point in the document, the me-
dium is said to write, “It seems clear that
the critic, who is more of an alchemist
than a chemist (and not exactly like either
of them), is a transmuter and transmitter,
and not one who pretends to understand”
(31). This is not only a treatise on criti-
cism generally—but can also be used as a
method of reading Savigliano’s book. Here
I heed the medium’s advice. Given that the
progression of the book requires reading
with an improvisatory temporality, trans-
mitting Angora Matta thus requires a kind
of disordering of the books’ formal arc. I
emphasize Chapter 2, a performance inter-
val titled “The Contested Object/El Objeto
en Disputa.” It is vital to begin here as the
rest of the book can be said to orbit around
its presence. The chapter features “Angora
Matta,” the title of Savigliano’s Tangópera-
Thriller, an actual libretto that occupies
both the literal and conceptual center of the
book. It is also the part of the text extended
beyond the bookends. “Angora Matta” was
conceived as a multi-media performance
that premiered in Buenos Aires in 2002.
The work is geographically set between
L.A., Buenos Aires, and Miami, yet para-
doxically calls for “a minimum of sceno-
graphic resources” (58). The plot of the
work stars an exiled assassin-for-hire (An-
gora Matta) who leaves her Beverly Hills
home to return to her native Argentina on
an important mission. Staged to cultivate
an air of mistaken motive, we are led to
believe that her objective is to murder her
lover, typically the first ring of the death
knell for any iconic femme fatale. In the
second act, Matta’s actual motive is made
clear: to alter the tide of Argentine politics
by assassinating its president, a figure that
is an amalgamation of leaders past. In a na-
tion historically besieged, at the mercy of
its military and oligarchs, Matta emerges as
an unlikely figure for this singular act. The
tangópera’s initial dénouement sadly reso-
nates with the fate of many a Latin Ameri-
can country: the criminal transfer of funds
and the safe housing of the perpetrator from
an undisclosed location in Miami.
It is a bit difficult to imagine trying to
stage “Angora Matta” according to Savigli-
ano’s direction—and there are some ramifi-
cations here on the larger text worth noting.
For example, the author calls for much of
the staged action to occur by way of back-
ground projections (i.e. through “Balinese
style” shadow puppets which “could be re-
placed through animation”) (57). This nota-
tion condenses a highly complex form often
too easily pillaged for other uses, an impulse
that Savigliano has adamantly challenged
elsewhere. These impulses are especially
critiqued in Tango, which works to undo
a number of narratives forcefully imposed
upon the dance as form, the Rio Plata re-
gion, and its populations. In other sections
of Angora Matta, Savigliano challenges tan-
go’s violent disfigurement when too easily
imported to other contexts. I wanted more
description of how the actors could come to
“cultivate tangoesque body language” (59)
and wondered how that “language,” left as
such, might be badly translated, or this cho-
reography might be taken up in the wrong
hands altogether. The author’s shorthand of
this performative corporeality might privi-
lege accessibility over, and even at the ex-
pense of, complexity.
Nevertheless, the most compelling force
behind the libretto (indeed, one of the gifts
of the book) is Savigliano’s invention of an
actual genre. Tangópera’s logoclassia col-
lides two genres with accented différance.
Upending the ordered power of the binary,
Savigliano affronts opera with an aesthetic
world from the South. We are left to won-
der where one ends and the other begins.
In this way, I situate Angora Matta in the
tradition of Catherine Clément. In this ver-
sion, Savigliano updates and restyles forms
of back talk against the larger “undoing of
women.”
For many in Argentina (though certainly
not all), thrillers have been less spectacular
pleasure for others than an actual way of life,
brutally open-ended and with no resolve.
The final chapter of Angora Matta gestures
towards this dilemma. The book does not
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  105
 end as much as it troubles finitude: we are
left with other forms of evidence that do not
seem to fit. Again, the structure is tripar-
tite. There are several scholarly essays au-
thored by two other personas in the libretto
(an ethnographer and foreign film critic) in
their respective fields. These essays are fol-
lowed by a series of fragments, titled “Edgy
Meditations/Meditaciones Filosas” which are
attributed to Angora Matta. It is difficult to
grasp how they are supposed to function as
the proverbial ends that justify. Hopefully,
Savigliano will take up some of these ends
left behind by Angora Matta (the book and
character) with her next project. Given the
brave strides Savigliano has taken between
her two books, we have something to look
forward to. For now, we are left with the
promising harbinger: “Books covered her
bed. The knife under her pillow.”
Alexandra Vázquez,
New York University
LOLLIPOP: VAUDEVILLE TURNS WITH
A FANCHON AND MARCO DANCER
by Reva Howitt Clar; edited by Mimi Mel-
nick, 2002. Lanham, Md.: The Scarecrow
Press, Inc. 286 pp., index. $35.00 cloth.
In the mid-1920s, a novel form of theatri-
cal entertainment took root in the United
States. Movie prologs, as they were known,
showcased live performers and musicians
in vaudeville and revue-format entertain-
ments presented before the screening of
feature films. Although curiously neglected
in most contemporary accounts of vaude-
ville history, the prologs were an extremely
popular, hybrid form of performance origi-
nally devised as a way to offset the public’s
boredom with silent films (Cohen 1978, 1).
By 1926, touring prologs devised by the film
producers and theatre owners traveled to
106  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
more than forty of the major picture palaces
on the chain (Cohen 1978, 1). First popular
in New York and then the Midwest, prologs
received a tremendous boost, particularly
on the West Coast, when the entrepreneur-
ing brother-sister team Fanchon and Marco
devised their ingenious “Ideas” format. A
brother-sister exhibition ballroom team
turned promoters and producing agents,
Fanchon and Marco (born Fanny and Mi-
chael Wolff), began their show business ad-
ventures in 1919 presenting so-called “jazz
operas,” which lent themselves well to the
prolog format. These brief revue-like pro-
ductions contained featured solos, Fanchon
and Marco ballroom numbers (their signa-
ture dance had Marco playing the violin as
Fanchon sat atop his shoulders), and a preci-
sion chorus. Their “Ideas” followed through
on the jazz opera idea, but offered multiple
specialty acts—dance, songs, comedy rou-
tines, acrobats, and novelty acts—which
unlike a typical vaudeville bill were orga-
nized, however loosely, around a “theme.” A
popular Broadway musical, a color scheme,
a fairy tale, current events—all were fodder
for these scripted revues, heavy on imagi-
native use of props of all sorts. Each Idea
opened and closed with a female precision
chorus, the first female tap lineup on the
West Coast (Cohen Stratyner 1984, 64–65).
Fanchon, one of the earliest female produc-
ers in Hollywood during the expansion era
of sound films and a principal dance direc-
tor for films at RKO, staged over a third of
the Ideas during the 1920s and early 1930s
(Cohen Stratyner 1984, 65).
Lollipop tells the story of Reva Howitt
(Clar was her married name), a principal
performer with Fanchon and Marco’s Ideas
from 1925 to 1933. During her stage career
she alternated as one of the famed “San
Francisco Beauties” (Fanchon and Marco’s
permanent line of eight women dancers),
as a soloist, and as an adagio-exhibition
ballroom dancer. She later served as a
“head girl” (responsible for rehearsing the
tap lineup, setting tempos for the orches-
tra, and the like) and ultimately became
the co-director of the Fanchon and Marco
School of the Theatre. “How did a small
Jewish girl, growing up in a Central Cali-
fornia town on the wrong side of the tracks,
make her way into show business, which
in those far-off days was an area totally re-
moved from ordinary life?” muses Howitt
at the start of her memoir (3). Of course,
in those days, many young vaudevillians
were just like her—Jewish, Italian, or Irish
children of immigrants seeking a better life
than their parents, a working wage, or, as
in Howitt’s case, an escape from the routine
boredom of small-town life. Lollipop (which
refers to the nickname given to Howitt by
one of her longstanding dance partners)
chronicles an unlikely journey from her de-
but at age ten as the Sixth Fairy (in a high
school production of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream) to vaudeville hoofer. Growing up
in Stockton, California, the daughter of a
ne’er-do-well father (he left the scene when
she was eight) and a mother who relied on
the good graces of her parents to support a
young daughter and son, Howitt dreamed
of being a dancer—a ballet dancer. Begin-
ning with dance lessons with “Miss L,” the
gym teacher at Stockton High School, who,
as Howitt skeptically notes, had supposedly
studied with Ruth St. Denis, she found
her way to San Francisco, where relatives
housed her during a stint at the Hirsch-
Arnold Ballet School. When Mildred
Hirsch announced that her students might
want to audition for a show by Fanchon
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  107
 and Marco, Howitt seized the opportunity,
but thought it was temporary. “A chance to
acquire a few dollars and to acquire expe-
rience was never to be turned down,” she
notes (15). Howitt headed for the Warfield
Theatre in San Francisco, per­formed a very
simple ballet combination for Fanchon,
and, as she reflects, “glissaded myself into
my professional career” (16).
The theatrical memoir genre is rife with
the predictable pitfalls of novice writers
eager to tell their stories. Too often these
autobiographical accounts are overly senti­
mental, minimally self-reflective, and writ-
ten in a breezy, offhand manner. But Lol-
lipop goes several steps beyond the facile
“show biz” account to offer a layered por-
trait of a fascinating slice of vaudeville his-
tory and one young woman’s attempt to find
her place within this galaxy of omnipresent
talent and oversized egos.
The unusual construction of Lollipop—
edited by Howitt’s daughter, Mimi Mel-
nick, a jazz pianist and music critic—is
both the book’s major strength and, some-
times, its weakness. Howitt began her ac-
tual diary entries in February of 1926, about
a year after she had begun performing with
Fanchon and Marco. A string of these en-
tries can be tiring after a while, as they of-
ten do little more than catalog the number
of rehearsals she attended or the cities she
performed in. When she was in her seven-
ties, though, Howitt resurrected the jour-
nals, and filled out the entries with a narra-
tive account of her eight years on the road
with Fanchon and Marco, supplemented
by saved letters to her mother as well as
reviews and notices from her scrapbooks.
After Howitt’s death, Melnick unearthed
the memoir and added her own remem-
brances and comments, which substantiate
her mother’s discussion of historical persons
and incidents or analyze her career choices.
108  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
The result, then, is a kind of triple-voiced
discourse: Howitt’s twenty-something self,
simultaneously naïve and worldly-wise;
Howitt, the septuagenarian, reflecting on
that younger self; and her daughter’s own
thoughts and ruminations. This structure
has a tendency to produce a disjointed feel
and can disrupt the overall narrative flow.
But once the reader settles into the format,
it becomes an intriguing read—particularly
Howitt’s reminiscences, recollections, and
correctives as she imagines how she might
have handled herself differently nearly forty
years earlier. Looking back on herself dur-
ing those years and revisiting many of the
choices she made, Howitt is alternatively
gratified by her achievements and disap-
pointed in herself for some missed oppor-
tunities, like passing up the chance to meet
Martha Graham to discuss a possible future
association (168) and turning down an of-
fer to write Fanchon’s biography, one of the
biggest “blunders and under-estimations of
her abilities,” according to Melnick (272).
For the dance historian, there are some
tantalizing nuggets here. While it is indeed
a shame that Howitt never wrote Fanchon’s
biography, Lollipop captures the closest
glimpse that we are likely to find of the cre-
ative process of this highly successful, pro-
ductive, and imaginative female theatrical
producer. As Howitt notes, a new Idea “was
ground out each week, like Fords rolling
off the assembly line” (143). Ideas generally
came completely pre-packaged with every-
thing from casts to costumes and withstood
up to fifty weeks of touring. One of the most
popular of the Ideas, which Howitt dis-
cusses at some length, was called “Gobs of
Joy”—the first to tour nationwide. An Idea
with a nautical theme (gob was slang for
sailor), the show featured five dance teams
(Howitt among them), attired in navy blue
officers’ jackets and white visored caps, who
performed an elaborate clog dance on a se-
ries of wooden boxes (144). Typical of Fan-
chon and Marco’s flair for the theatrical,
the prolog boasted a “flash finish” which
featured a battleship with revolving guns
that discharged flash powder and smoke
(145). Although one wishes that Howitt had
provided even more specific descriptions of
some of the dances throughout the book,
she nonetheless offers a sense of the range
of numbers that vaudeville dancers were ex-
pected to know—from ballroom, buck and
wing, and the waltz clog, to the apache and
stair dance.
Some of the most interesting anecdotes
concern Howitt’s discussion of the danc-
ers’ rehearsal and training methods. One of
the principal dance directors for the Ideas
was Gae Foster (one of Fanchon’s original
dancers, who in the thirties went on to
produce the famed Gae Foster Girls preci-
sion dance line at the Roxy Theatre in New
York City) (77, 84). Howitt, in relating her
trial-by-fire training in tap dance—a spe-
cialty facilitated, as she notes, by her pro-
ficiency in ballet and sense of rhythm as a
San Francisco Beauty—notes how Foster
“ordered” her to learn a soft-shoe routine
performed to “Swanee River” by specialty
dancer Dick O’Meara. Howitt describes
how she spent all her time between shows
learning from O’Meara in the dark, dank
basement of the Warfield Theatre (39). But
more often than not, the dancers were left
to their own devices and expected to come
up with original and inventive steps, which
the producers would later polish and per-
fect (79). As Howitt notes, “trading steps”
was a popular pastime, and “we spent many
between-shows learning steps from anyone
able to add to our store” (60, 79). For their
tap numbers, the dancers often relied on the
musicians. Howitt, for instance, discusses a
dance born of an impromptu collaboration
with the drummer of the Pyramid Trio,
who taught her some elementary drum rolls.
She and her sister lineup dancers devised
a number “where we duplicated with our
feet what he did on the drums” (79). She
reflects back with some horror, however, at
how she was literally thrown onto the stage
as an exhibition ballroom dancer with an
equally inexperienced partner: “Jack knew
as little as I did, or I should say less, because
I doubt he had done more than the equiva-
lent of the couple of foxtrots that he and I
had shared on a date at Coffee Dan’s in Los
Angeles” (97). The constant demands for
novelty, however, often backfired. Howitt
deplores having had to do a stilt dance (“A
monkey could have been trained to walk
on stilts”) (123), and she never much liked
the Polar Idea, where she had to perform
a military tap dance while wearing very
short shorts and a waist-length sleeveless
jacket “from which small, white fox tails
hung at the sides, and which had red pat-
ent leather epaulets outlined with ermine
tails” (86). But, as Melnick notes in one of
her asides, these paled in comparison with
the so-called “Salad Idea,” where the lineup
dancers had to emerge from a salad bowl
dressed as “salts and peppers and lettuce
leaves” (123).
Howitt was a consummate professional,
and the seeming indignities of some of these
routines often rankled this once-aspiring
ballet dancer who frequently lamented her
lack of a college education. While Howitt
says she “loved the excitement and mobility
of show business and the physical expression
of professional dancing” (73), she regrets not
having developed her decidedly intellectual
abilities. Howitt (who in her later years be-
came a writer for the California Historical
Quarterly and for Western States Jewish His-
tory) recalls a particularly trying time per-
forming as an exhibition ballroom dancer
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  109
 at Marquard’s Café in San Francisco, where
she “romped through all the popular writers
of the day”— including heavy doses of Scho-
penhauer and Dostoyevski (108). Howitt’s
story is in part one of becoming a first-rate
hoofer in spite of herself. She never thought
she would remain in the popular theatre
for as long as she did, and perhaps this ex-
plains why Howitt didn’t turn her sights to
her memoir earlier. It seems that only later
in life, as she reflected on her career, could
Howitt give herself credit for her accom-
plishments and come to acknowledge her
place in theatrical and cultural history. In
retrospect, Howitt says, “I was the flapper,
the vamp, the Charleston, the Black Bot-
tom, the jazz baby, the keen dance, the cat’s
meow, and yes, I was Lollipop, Miss Roar-
ing Twenties in person” (212). Reva Howitt
Clar’s story is actually several stories, each
valuable to the theatre and dance historian:
vaudeville as it adapted to the emergence of
sound film; the producing genius of Fan-
chon and Marco; and dance on the popular
stage of the 1920s.
Julie Malnig
The Gallatin School
New York University
110  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
Works Cited
Cohen, Barbara Naomi. 1978. “Chain
Prologs: Dance at the Picture Palaces.”
Dance Scope, vol. 13, no. 1 (Fall).
Cohen Stratyner, Barbara. 1984. “Fanchon:
Popular Entertainment Entrepreneur.”
Women & Performance, vol. 2, no. 1.
Gremillion, Helen. 2003. Feeding Anorexia:
Gender and Power at a Treatment Center.
North Carolina, NC: Duke University
Press.
Martin, Emily. 1987. Woman in the Body: A
Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Bos-
ton: Beacon Press.
Savigliano, Marta. 1995. Tango and the Po-
litical Economy of Passion. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2004 [1992].
Bodies, Death and Silence. In Violence
in War and Peace: An Anthology. Nancy
Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bour-
gois, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing. 175–185.
Seremetakis, Nadia. 1996. The Senses Still:
Perception and Memory as Material Cul-
ture in Modernity. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Report
DANCE MEDICINE:  services for dancers at the university level;
AT THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL
Introduction
Dance Medicine is a branch in the field of
performing arts medicine that deals with
the medical and musculoskeletal issues that
are specific to dance (Bronner, Ojofeitimi,
& Spriggs, 2003; Toledo, Akuthota, Drake,
Nadler, & Chou, 2004). Dancers are a
unique blend of both athletes and artists
(Bronner et al., 2003; Stretanski & We-
ber, 2002). Dance, like athletics is a physi-
cally demanding activity with significant
strength, flexibility, and endurance require-
ments (Askling, Lund, Saartok, & Thor-
stensson, 2002; Harley et al., 2002; Toledo
et al., 2004), while at the same time requir-
ing artistic expression (Toledo et al., 2004)
in front of a live audience (Hamilton, Ham-
ilton, Marshall, & Molnar, 1992). Medical
professionals have consequently adopted a
sports medicine model in providing health
care to dancers within their organizations
(Bronner et al., 2003). Although dance and
athletics require similar levels of physical
fitness, researchers (Liederbach, 1997; To-
ledo et al., 2004) have described some fac-
tors that distinguish dance from athletics,
including the high ranges of motion found
in dancers, the lack of specificity and peri-
odicity in dance training, and the expres-
sive and aesthetic nature of dance. The
purposes of this paper will be to a) discuss
the status and future scope of research in
dance medicine, especially at the university
level; b) share some of my experiences as a
neophyte dance medicine athletic trainer;
c) detail our model of delivery of healthcare
and finally to d) look ahead to the future of
dance medicine.
Research in Dance Medicine
There is limited available quality research
regarding medical problems of dancers,
with the Journal of Dance Medicine and Sci-
ence, the official journal of the International
Association of Dance Medicine and Sci-
ence (IADMS), and Medical Problems of
Performing Artists, the official journal of
the Performing Artists Medical Associa-
tion (PAMA), being among the handful of
journals dealing with medical issues specific
to dancers. Not surprisingly then, dance in-
juries have been referred to as the “orphan
child” in the sports medicine family (Schon
& Weinfield, 1996), with dancers repre-
senting a medical underserved occupational
group at high risk for work-related muscu-
loskeletal disorders (Bronner et al., 2003).
Further, research in dance medicine pri-
marily focuses on professional-level danc-
ers, either in ballet companies (Byhring &
Bo, 2002; Garrick & Requa, 1993; Hamil-
ton et al., 1992; Milan, 1994; Stretanski &
Weber, 2002; Westblad, Tsai-Fellander, &
Johansson, 1995) or theatrical dance compa-
nies (Bronner & Brownstein, 1997; Carva-
jal, Evans, Evans, Nash, & Carvajal, 1998;
Evans, Evans, & Carvajal, 1996; Washing-
ton, 1978), with relatively lesser research
(Askling et al., 2002; Garrick, 1999; Luke
et al., 2002) focusing on student dancers.
Dance Medicine: A New Journey
When I first started working with dance
medicine, several things were novel for
me as a traditional athletic trainer now
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  113
 plunging into the relatively unexplored
field (for me) of dance medicine. One of
the first things that struck me was that I
had to modify my treatment plans for this
unique subset of individuals: the amazing
flexibility of dancers deemed that the regu-
lar stretching program prescribed for ath-
letes would not be as beneficial for danc-
ers. Another fascinating aspect of dancers
in my experience was hearing from various
dancers the recurring idea that the dancer’s
body is just an “instrument of artistic ex-
pression.” Although this thought is under-
standable and perfectly acceptable, for some
dancers this belief system may lead to the
abuse of their bodies in pursuit of aesthetic
and/or artistic excellence. This may lead
to formation of potentially harmful eating
practices. Further, in my experience as a
healthcare professional working with danc-
ers, in the student dancer community the
awareness of keeping the body fit through
cross-training practices (i.e., exercising or
performing physical activity apart from
dance, like swimming) is relatively un-
common and needs to be addressed. It is
comprehensible that added pressures exist
on a dancer unlike that for an athlete; as
long as athletes perform well, their physi-
cal appearance might not undergo excessive
scrutiny, but for a dancer the aesthetics of
body morphology is more important. Still,
in my opinion there needs to be a greater
awareness of respecting the body and treat-
ing it as more than just an instrument of
expression.
Dance Medicine and Healthcare
At the recent National Athletic Trainers’
Association’s 56th Annual Meeting and
Clinical Symposia in June 2005 in India-
napolis, Indiana, it was heartening to see
that there were several presentations de-
voted to performing arts medicine. Ad-
114  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
ditionally, there is talk of formation of a
special interest group for athletic trainers
interested in the performing arts, and a
workshop at the next meeting. This is good
news for the relatively new field of dance
medicine, as the word-of-mouth publicity
of this program will filter down to incoming
students in the athletic training profession
and other healthcare professions, fueling
interest in caring for performing artists and
thus improving the health care provided to
dancers.
The annual conference of the Interna-
tional Association of Dance Medicine and
Science (IADMS), which I had the op-
portunity to attend in London at the La-
ban Institute in October 2003, is another
good conference for individuals interested
in healthcare for dancers. Attending the
conference was a really heartening and en-
lightening experience, as it helped me be-
come aware of significant issues in Dance
Medicine. It also offered an opportunity to
rub shoulders with dance medicine profes-
sionals from around the world, and to get a
sense of current practices in the field. Par-
ticipating in discussions at the conference
about these topics provided valuable input
as to the cutting-edge research in this field.
This experience was also of value as we
set up a dance medicine facility to provide
medical care for students in the depart-
ment of dance at the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). A de-
tailed description of this program is offered
below.
Background
The UNCG Dance Medicine Program has
been providing athletic training services
since January 2004 to all UNCG students
enrolled in dance classes. The target popu-
lation for the UNCG Dance Medicine Pro-
gram is all students enrolled in any dance
classes within the Department of Dance at
UNCG (~200). Students are provided with
emergency care and comprehensive reha-
bilitation athletic training, as well as health
care services provided by a nationally cer-
tified and state licensed Certified Athletic
Trainer (ATC). The program is designed
to meet the needs of the dance students by
functioning as a center for triage of all med-
ical complaints. The program maintains
close relationships with the department of
dance, the department of exercise and sport
science, the collegiate athletic training de-
partment, and the student health center.
Referrals are made to the medical physi-
cians, specialty clinics, and preliminary
diagnostic services (e.g., X-rays) offered in
the student health center, as deemed appro-
priate by the ATC under the supervision of
the medical director of the student health
center. The following is a description of
some of the salient features of the program
from its inception and its operation over the
past year and a half. Wherever appropriate,
I have tried to explain the issues we faced
and how we plan to work on them.
Services Provided
Services are offered in a clinic-type format,
with dance students voluntarily signing up
for appointments for either evaluation or
rehabilitation services. Walk-ins are also
allowed, although preference is given to
students with prior appointments. Services
are offered eight hours a week, staggered
across three days in the week, so as to allow
for treating students with differing class
schedules. In cases of emergencies, or the
need for expeditious evaluation and treat-
ment, special times are made for appoint-
ments. Additionally, guest lectures in dance
classes are conducted by the ATCs, helping
to educate dance students regarding injuries
in dancers and principles of treatment.
For the initial stocking of our clinic in
the first year of the program, we compiled
a list based on what was traditionally pres-
ent in an intercollegiate athletic training
room. Over the day-to-day operation of the
program, however, it became apparent that
the functioning of the program was more
akin to that of a rehabilitation clinic than a
traditional university athletic training pro-
gram. Several of the supplies ordered (e.g.,
athletic tape, moleskin, heel-lace pads, and
tongue depressors) were not frequently used,
with lower extremity rehabilitation equip-
ment (e.g., Airex® Pads for ankle strength
exercises and Therabands®) receiving the
maximum usage. In the coming year, we
therefore plan to order more rehabilitation
equipment and therapeutic modalities to
assist with treatment and reconditioning.
Program Beneficiaries
A little thought of, but important, aspect of
any new service is the fundamental ques-
tion: Who is benefiting from this service?
This leads further to the sustained viability
of the program in the future. For us, this
led to a thorough assessment of all indi-
viduals connected with the program. The
dance students obviously are the most di-
rect beneficiaries, but they are definitely not
the only ones! Other beneficiaries include
the ATC who provides services, and the
research arm of the school of health and
human performance at UNCG. The pro-
gram offers the ATC providing the services
(a student working towards a Ph.D. in the
school) clinical experience in providing
athletic training services in a nontraditional
setting and in the up-and-coming field of
dance medicine. Further, the program also
provides access to dancers as a potentially
unique, physically active population for
research. This population has not been
studied in depth with regard to the norms
Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  115
 and distinctive problems, although some
research does exist for professional elite
dancers (Hamilton et al., 1992). Recently,
opportunities were made available to un-
dergraduate students in the sports medicine
and/or dance concentration to volunteer in
the clinic. We have also given thought to
the potential of adding this as a clinical site
in the future, providing experiences to stu-
dents in the entry-level master’s program in
athletic training.
Additionally, the fact that this service is
provided at the university level in only a few
selected institutions increases national and
international recognition and prestige for
the university, by allowing the university to
make a unique place for itself in this field.
Good potential thus exists for the program
to become a template for other programs
wishing to offer services to dancers.
Finally, there also exist opportunities for
the program to become a site for teaching
(both undergraduate and graduate) and re-
search. Therefore, it can be seen that the
program has several beneficiaries. The suc-
cess of this program, as any other collabora-
tion between various bodies, is a two-way
process and has transpired due to the sup-
port of all interested parties since the pro-
gram’s inception.
Injuries in Dance Medicine
Almost two-thirds of all dancers enrolled
in the department of dance were seen for
treatments in only three semesters since the
program’s commencement. This number is
high, considering that the clinic was open
only eight hours per week and the patients
were seen only once a week (as compared
to three times a week for a traditional re-
habilitation setting), due to limited man-
power. Further, it also needs to be kept in
mind that in the first year of the program,
the idea of having a health care provider
116  Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005
specifically for dancers was a very unique
concept for a lot of dance students, and not
all dancers knew about it or they were un-
acquainted with the format of the program.
In the year and a half since the inception
of the program, attendance has been con-
stantly increasing through word-of-mouth
publicity, with a majority of dance students
now aware of the existence of the program.
Only 20% of the injuries seen were acute
in nature, with the majority of injuries be-
ing either chronic/overuse type of injuries
(48%) or recurring chronic injuries (32%).
This trend has also been noted by other
researchers (Byhring & Bo, 2002; Garrick,
1999; Liederbach, 2000; Nilsson, Leander-
son, Wykman, & Strender, 2001). Muscu-
loskeletal injuries accounted for over 65% of
all injuries, lending support to the observa-
tion by Luke et al. (Luke et al., 2002), who
suggested a 90% lifetime incidence of mus-
culoskeletal injuries in dancers. Further, as
was also noted by other researchers, lower
extremity injuries accounted for a majority
(70%) of all injuries seen in the clinic, which
is in agreement with the observations of
previous researchers in professional ballet
companies (Byhring & Bo, 2002; Nilsson
et al., 2001). A detailed breakdown of the
injuries seen in the clinic, separated by body
part, can be seen in Table 1.
Where to from here?
In the immediate future, we plan to admin-
ister an “Outcomes Assessment” survey to
all students who have received services from
the program. Incoming dance students will
complete a health history questionnaire to
identify any potential problems and to get a
health baseline available for the healthcare
providers when the dance students come
to see them. In addition, this will help to
make incoming students more aware of
the program and make them more likely to
Table 1: Injuries by Body Part

Individual Cumulative
Body Part Injuries
Percentage Percentage

Head 0 0%
Neck 1 1%
Chest 2 1% Head-Face-Neck 1%
Abdomen 0 0%
Back 24 18% Back 18%
Shoulder 12 9%
Upper Arm 0 0%
Elbow 1 1%
Forearm 0 0%
Wrist 0 0%
Hand 2 1% Upper Extremity 11%
Pelvis 3 2%
Hip 16 12%
Thigh 8 6%
Knee 24 18%
Leg 16 12%
Ankle 16 12%
Foot 11 8% Lower Extremity 70%

Total 136 100% 100%

seek help in case of medical problems. We
envision the UNCG Dance Medicine Pro-
gram to be a template for other programs
to follow in providing quality healthcare to
dancers through effective application of the
medical sciences for dancers, and we hope
that it will help improve the level of health-
care delivery to dancers.
In Closing
The whole realm of Dance Medicine has
been a rich and enlightening experience for
me,and I am encouraged to see that more
healthcare professionals are ready to get
involved with dance medicine, looking at
dancers the way I like to think of them: as
super-athletes who not only need to be at the
“top of their game,” but who have to per-
form according to aesthetic demands while
doing it. It is my optimistic belief that the
scope of the field of dance medicine will
be expanded in future years by providing
services that encompass all the performing
arts, including music and theater, through
a happy marriage of arts and science, with
the overarching goal of enabling perform-

Dance Research Journal 37/2 Winter 2005  117

 ers to return to their passion, their art, and
continue dancing for audiences in a win-
win situation for all!
Happy Dancing . . . and Keep
Healthy!!!
Jatin P. Ambegaonkar
MS ATC OT CSCS
Applied Neuromechanics Research
Laboratory Department of Exercise
and Sport Science, University of
North Carolina at Greensboro
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